is indigestible, there is food and medicine
in a small dose of light pure wine. The white
nervous tongue of the sickly dressmaker, who
thirsts for tea that weakens further the deficient
appetite, if she took in place of tea a little
cheap pure Bordeaux wine, with an equal
quantity of water, would recover healthy colour
as her stomach regained tone and appetite, and
her blood flowed in healthier current. It would
be well for the town child between seven and
ten years old, who flags in appetite and is
dainty with his meat, as children are allowed to
flag in nurseries from which no comfort need be
excluded, if the doctor's order answered to Dr.
Druitt's suggestion in such case, Give some
kind of light, clean tasting, sub-acid wine—
Rhine, Bordeaux, Chablis, or some of the clean,
dry wine of Greece and Hungary—let this be
sipped freely at dinner, and then look to your
mutton. Great is the refreshing appetising
power of these true wines, many of them costing
only fifteenpence a bottle, and most wholesome
is the enlivening power that depends not
only on alcoholic strength, but on the subtle
influence of refreshing principles that tell their
presence in sweet odours and a grateful taste.
A child down with scarlet fever or measles,
restless with pain and thirst, may find the
thirst quenched, the headache relieved, and a
quiet night's rest substituted for a night of
irritable tossing and tumbling, by sipping, not at
physic, but at Bordeaux wine and water—
Bordeaux cheap enough to be a solace in such hours
of sickness even to the very poor. The healthy
child, too, at its juvenile party, why should it
be made ill with glasses of cheap sherry when
pure and delicious sweet wines that will
delight its palate, and do good to its health, are
quite as easy to be had? Italy offers white
Capri at sixteen-pence a bottle, fragrant, brisk
as if slightly aërated, sub-acid, and altogether
wholesome. Greece offers the white Mount
Hymettus, which, at sixteen-pence a bottle, may
give pleasure to the experienced wine-drinker
by its firm, dry, clean character, and abundance
of peculiar wine flavour of a Tokay sort. The
Greek Visanto is a sweet, full-flavoured wine,
with little alcoholic strength.

Greek Santorin at twenty-pence a bottle is
one of the stronger class of undrugged wines,
and very like a light dry port. The Greek
wines, says Dr. Druitt, have more body than
the French, and seem to have a capacity for
developing fine flavour by keeping, of which we
cannot fully judge until they have been longer
in use. Of the Hungarian wines, some of the
finest, as the dry white wine called Ruszte, are
to be had for three and sixpence a bottle; there
is a good Hungarian Chablis at sixteen-pence,
noted as "a light wine, of light straw colour,
not too acid, rather too much bouquet;" and
the Hungarian Erlaure is pure and pleasant at
seventeen-pence; at half-a-crown, is highly
commended as "an excellent claret." Excellent
wines, too, are the Austrian red Voeslauer, at
two shillings a bottle, and the white Voeslauer,
at half-a-crown, immeasurably superior to the
cheap dinner sherry, for which it would be a
delightful substitute. In fact, there is half a
continent to choose from, a new world of
materials for health and social comfort to explore.
Dr. Druitt's book will supply, better than any
we know, the practical information with which
an experienced friend is able to turn a beginner's
face in the right direction. We have not yet
made out for ourselves a tenth or a hundredth
part of the uses and comforts of the cheap and
pure wine from which we have been forcibly
estranged for several generations past. A pure
wine, however cheap, if good of its sort, is, as
Dr. Druitt says, refreshment that none need be
ashamed to offer to a duke; an impure wine,
however expensive, is no drink for gentlemen.

AN UNPATENTED GHOST.

So plentiful, of late, has been the supply of
spectral apparitions, that it is with some
difficulty a new phantom, though furnished with the
strongest testimonials, can obtain a patient
hearing. It will therefore, perhaps, be the
discreeter course to fall in with the commercial
tone which has been given to the subject, and
be content with stating, in reference to the
ghost about to appear, that it is wholly
unprotected by any patent regulations whatever, and
perfectly at the service of anybody who can, by
the exercise of legitimate spells, render it
correspondent to command.

In the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven,
a gentleman, whose name, we shall pretend, is
Gauntrell, though in fact it is nothing of the
sort, was induced, by the prospect of excellent
perch fishing, to rent a comfortable cottage
residence, in a somewhat secluded neighbourhood, a
few miles from Abergavenny.

What particular fun there can be in snaring
that very abrupt, aggressive, and—when
captured—all but worthless, fish, we cannot divine.
Excepting the charm of voracity, it seems to
display no characteristic that should endear it
to the angler's soul, or be likely to beguile a
sensible, middle-aged gentleman, like Mr. Gauntrell,
to settle two hundred miles from his natural
haunts and home. Habit, however, is second
nature, a fact one is too apt to forget, while
opening the eyes of wonder at a hero who smokes
his cheroot under a heavy cannonade, or a
distinguished character (of another kind) who
expressly stipulates for pig and prune sauce (and
"plenty" of the latter) as his final repast on
earth. Mr. Gauntrell had passed his earlier
years on the banks of a famous perch river, and
the enmity there first engendered between himself
and that warlike fish family, had probably
assumed something of the aspect of the vendetta,
or death-feud, extending even to other streams
and districts.

To speak with precision, "Grisewood Cottage"
was something more than it pretended to
be, possessing two good stories, the upper nestling
in an enormously deep thatched roof, half
overgrown with creepers and lichen, and an